They Call Her Sara
by Astralis
Summary: Sara is losing control and it scares her. Some GrissomSara backstory and some of Sara's feelings for him.


THEY CALL HER SARA  
  
A/N: My first ever CSI fanfic! Some of the background information used in this comes from the official CSI website. I don't own Sara or CSI and I'm not getting anything from this except ridding myself of a mad plot bunny.  
  
***  
  
THEY CALL HER SARA  
  
All her life, they have tried to label her, to stick her in a box, to force her into some mold, some shape, that can be easily understood. They have tried to define her in an attempt to understand her, to get inside her head, to comprehend the world from her point of view. Sometimes they really want to know; more often they are just morbidly curious. She is not like other people. She knows this. Always has.  
  
She didn't realise she was different when she was young. You don't, do you? It never occurred to her that people were watching her, judging her, as she ran from one thing to another, brain working overtime, very rarely stopping to just be. She has never stopped. Sometimes she wonders, vaguely, somewhere in the back of her carefully compartmentalized mind, if that is why she is who she is. Her name is a label just like any other.  
  
When you get to high school, you begin to examine yourself and others, and people began to focus on her more than ever before. She was the nerd, the geek, the one the guys never had crushes on or if they did they were too afraid to say. She was too smart for the boys, too smart for everyone, even some of the teachers. She sat alone in the front of the classroom, drinking in the rules of science, understanding them without thought as though they had always been part of her.  
  
She moved through high school alone, feeling barriers of glass growing between her and the 'outside' world. She still has those barriers, though they are fragile in places. She has learnt to be very, very careful about who she lets in. It does not do to be vulnerable, although she is strangely vulnerable where those walls are weakest. Vulnerability leads to hurt and she has been hurt before. The barriers still feed off that pain, getting stronger and stronger while the fragile areas slowly but surely disintegrate. She has learnt to protect those fragile areas as much as possible, like a soldier protects himself with a shield. She is good at it now; most people only see the shield, the strong part of the walls, and the one person she would be willing to allow to pass through the shattered glass keeps his distance. Perhaps this is a good thing. She has always found it hard to trust; it is entirely possible that she is incapable of truly sharing her life and letting down all the barriers. She has worked hard to build them.  
  
Harvard was like a whole, dizzying new world. For a while she was intoxicated, feeding off new knowledge, people who were more like her that anyone else had ever been, flinging herself into the partying and dating scene. It didn't last. She couldn't cope with the pressures of being the certain person she was expected to be at the parties, couldn't cope with scathing rejections from men who found that the real her wasn't like the face she put on. Battered, bruised, she retreated into a shell of physics and a frenzy of science, pushing herself further and further ahead, involving herself in everything the department had to offer. A criminalistics seminar from a visiting scientist had thrown her into her new life; at last she had a goal to aim for, a something to direct her energies and brains into, perhaps the first chance to become a recognisable whole: "Crime Scene Investigator" rather than a patchwork of mismatched bits of science. Someone that could be accurately labelled.  
  
He was the only man she felt she could love. For her, the idea of romantic love was tempered, qualified, by the need to protect her tenderest areas. He had taken her under his wing, taught her, let her take flight for the first time and guided her on her path. He had brought her to Vegas, where she could work with him. He never mentioned the night he'd kissed her when she was just out of grad school, but drawn back from that. He knew how to get through the barriers but he'd never tried it, not since that night. Once, she had tried to push her way through her self-imposed isolation when he'd weakened those delicate walls with a sharp arrow, fired unthinkingly. "Honey." She felt the sting and the pain of his rejection and tried to rebuild those broken barriers. Weekly she feels with increasing terror that she is losing control, that the walls she tries so hard to maintain are becoming ever frailer.  
  
This scares her. The idea of breaking out, of losing control, of sundering the forces that hold her in check is petrifying. If she loses control she will not be the person she has made herself, but will just "be". She feels that if this happens she will no longer recognise herself. Those bits she has tried to push into the CSI mold will go flying out, scattered by the force of the explosion and she will be left bare, unprotected, unshielded, a silent figure standing alone in the face of a silent world.  
  
She tries to cling to herself, to the tough-girl persona she has created and almost perfected. She feels like an actress on show, mask slipping inch by inch to reveal her real face; a real face with which even she is unfamiliar.  
  
She no longer trusts herself. She must reign herself in around him, like a wild horse being forced to submit to the constraints of domestication. She has never had love before and the way she reacts in the face of the tenuous possibly of it is frightening. It is like walking a tightrope: one foot out of place, one miscalculation of balance could send her plummeting to her doom.  
  
She doesn't know what this doom might be for her, once she has lost control. Anything might happen. This is not the sort of thing that she likes. She needs predictability and control, control of everything around her but most importantly herself. She suspects that only by losing control she will find out who she really is and that is another reason to maintain that control.  
  
She is running scared. Running from him, from herself, from memories, placing increasing distance between herself and other people. People who have expectations that she feels increasingly unable to fulfill. She cannot leave Vegas, not while he is here. She must simply run on this treadmill she has created for herself and wait for the inevitable.  
  
She is Sara. That is what they all call her. Sara Sidle. It is a label, a label forced on her by people who do not know her. Sara is the name of the persona and of the scared girl hiding behind walls. Sara is who she is, they say. She must accept this, "Sara", a scrawled label slapped hastily onto a badly-wrapped package. Perhaps when the contents of the package spill out, as they must, they will still be Sara. Perhaps once they have spilled they will become a functioning whole.  
  
Perhaps one day she will accept that she is Sara and will come to know who Sara is. Perhaps he will help her to put the pieces together. 


End file.
